On this page some of the FREESCO team members have added some background information about their involvement in the FREESCO project.
This page http://freesco.info/index.php?id=t contains the current FREESCO team members.

I started out with FREESCO in 1999 and I had just started tinkering with Linux systems. I had been using Win Proxy up until the free trial expired and was in search of a better solution when it was recommended that I try out this new program on a floppy called FREESCO. Soon I discovered just how powerful a floppy could really be and moved to a hard drive install. At that time packages were not really much of an option, but a few began to post how to get certain things installed and how to make them run in FREESCO. Finally the birth of v0.2.7 came along and addon Packages became a reality and at that point I was completely hooked with finding out just how much this little OS could really do and began making packages for FREESCO. At first with the Apache package, just because everyone said it would never run on FREESCO and after that just because I always wanted more. It so happened that at the pre birth of the 03x series I happened to ask Serge for a pre-beta copy of the new OS so that I could begin making packages for it. But as a twist of fate I ended up being one of the few or maybe even the only one that even had a copy of this version and when it seemed that FREESCO was on it's way out. I decided to continue Serge's work on making this new version run and thought that when Serge returned I would be able to contribute my developement. After a year of work on this completely new design I had a running version and at that time Serge came back online for a brief period of time. To my suprise when I talked with Serge about what I had done he stated that he was no longer able to continue working on FREESCO. He also stated that he was pleased with the changes that I had made and to continue as the primary developer with his blessings. So as a strange twist of fate this wonderful piece of software which I had previously just supported and had hoped to contribute to it's developement, sudenly fell into my lap so to speak. The rest of the story is mostly common knowledge and a browse through the various 03x release tells the percentage of the story. But there are few labors in this world that bring as much satisfaction as I have recieved from working on FREESCO. Along with the other people who are associated with FREESCO that I truly consider an honor to know.

I first started checking out / looking at FREESCO in early 2000. I got 'hooked' within 2 months. Most likely it was sooner than that, cause my FREESCOsoft site was born in mid to late 2000.

I was looking for a 'inexpensive' if not FREE way to share the internet with my LAN. At that time I was using (sorry for swearing, by some people) Windows NT and WinGate to share the connection. For me, the dial-up was the issue, not many places actually offered that capability, but FREESCO did. I was a windows person (100%) back then, so made the disk on a windows machine. That for me was a stumper. I kept getting bad disks. Who would have thunk that a disk would go bad over time .
So after a few disks, I had FREESCO 027 up and running. COOL Got the hardware set and things to see each other. In less than a day, I had my first FREESCO machine up and running. It was serving the internet to the whole LAN. In less than 1 day of having FREESCO serving the LAN, I had the NT machine 'demoted' to just a local server.

Near the end of 2000 I noticed, from posts on the original forum, that there were packages for FREESCO, that could be installed and used to 'help'/replace servers and such on my mostly Windows LAN. i.e. remove some windows machine servers and go Linux .
Well when I was going through and redoing machines, seeing which would be better or faster and such, I kept having to re-download the packages. I got sick of that and decided to keep a local copy of them on my LAN. Then I needed to find an easy way for me to access the files (get a list) that did not look like a note book list. So I made a few pages and linked them and made virtually a site for them. Since I seemed to enjoy doing that work and having a copy that was close to me (or quicker) I thought why not get a 'local' copy of all the packages. You never know when you might have a need for something. Shortly after that I opened up my local LAN server to the public and made my “local copy” available to everyone. Actually there were not many 'packagers' back then, Lightning, TiGeR, WAPR, a few others and oh yes …Dingetje, he was among the most well known, and still is for his packages, and more. Needless to say, FREESCOsoft was born shortly after that. At that time I also had a “fast access” website remotely located, that I used for other things. It did not take long before I had to migrate the site from my local LAN to the remote site. All this due to traffic and not being able to use my own connection .
Some time shortly after that I registered FREESCOsoft.com and .net and also recieved .org (as a present you might say). So I was ready to go. Things have gone from a 15Mb site to over 500Mb and is still looking towards more growth (would not like the work, but would like the growth and usage people get out of it, so deal with the extra work).

After a little time as a member on the old forum, actually the second FREESCO forum location (that I know about). The forum had reached its limits (either in space or SQL size, not sure, but it is not the point) and the forum stopped working, error after error after error. It was about a week after the forum was down that I thought about creating an “interim” forum that could be used until a perminent forum was recreated or moved to a better location or whatever. Well the forum still has not moved since then (besides to its own domain name, forums.freesco.org) and it is running as strong as ever.

So, in conclusion, my FREESCO life has gone from a small home dial-up 'thing' to remove Windows machine … to hosting the forums and running FREESCOsoft. All that I can say is … I would not change what I have done, and would not want to even in 20-20 hind-sight. FREESCO has done me very well and I am willing to put as much back into it as possible.

As for FREESCO itself, well you can not beat it with a stick, there must be a protective shield around it, like it puts around your LAN, nothing can get through or take it down, unless you want it to. You will !NEVER! see this man going back to anything else. FREESCO has me and won't let go. I hope the same thing happens to you

I discovered FREESCO when I was looking for a replacement for several windoze based proxies and firewall (none of which I liked very much) to share my @home cable connection. Struggling for a few days to get the damn thing to get a DHCP lease. Turned out, my modem was caching the MAC address, doh! Yes, I too, once, was a FREESCO newbie!

Hooked on FREESCO since 2001 (at least according to my uptime tracker, that's when I first booted my system ).
My first FREESCO was a 486DX2 66Mhz, and it ran smoothly until the http://dingetje.homeip.net site that it's hosting became too slow due to more and more PHP based pages and replacing the thttpd web server with Lightning's Apache package. One bad day also the RAM became bad, and I had to reboot the box every few days like it was a windoze machine! My next box was an old P150, then a P350 and finally the box it is today (also a P350).

I started developing packages, because it's FUN and helped me to understand linux and FREESCO a lot better! My first package was a port of the angel package to FREESCO 027. The rest is history…

My site has evolved from a few simple pages to promote FREESCO into the monster it has become today. I really must clean up some of those experiments…1)

Hooked on FREESCO since 2000 (at least according to my brain's uptime tracker). At the time, I wanted to experiment with Linux but did not want to install it dual boot along Windows, so I bought an el cheapo Celeron and installed Mandrake (7.0) on it. I also bought a el cheapo hardware router to share the Internet. 1 week later, I learned that with Linux you could resuscitate deprecated PCs into a router. I asked Google, found FREESCO, downloaded it, rawrite the floppy, sloted it into the dust accumulating 486's floppy and… it did not boot!!! That's when I found the FREESCO forums who promptly found a fix for my problem. Then, I got hooked. Mandrake on my Celeron was useless for learning Linux. I learned it with FREESCO and, in bonus, made tons of new friends on the forum. Finally, I resold the hardware router and the rest of the story is one long love affair since then.

I needed a simple router because I was sick and tired of the Windows “solutions” for sharing internet,
and a friend of mine suggested Freesco.

I tried it out an a 486DX2 at first, and found it to be everything I needed at that time.

I joined the forums in 2002, and found a great community, with a lot of nice and friendly people.
That's why I got stuck on the forum, and try to visit it at least once a day.
I did have some (bad) experience with Linux before, and decided Linux was not for me (yet)
But after having installed Freesco, I got hooked.

Now my trusty Freesco is running on a P2/3 350Mhz from HD with all kinds of packages installed.
So my first good experience with Linux is Freesco, and now I even have a Fedora Core 5 machine running next to my XP machine. And I have SuSe Linux 10.0 running on my laptop.
If it wasn't for the games I like to play, that still don't run on Linux,
I would have thrown Windows out the window some time ago.

And last but not least, I was invited to be a Freesco Team Member in July 2004.
Allthough my Linux experience is far from what others have here,
I'm very honored to be part of the team.